Facebook, Microsoft, More Join Fight to ‘Defend All Customers’ From Cyberattacks
Facebook and Microsoft have joined 32 other tech companies on Tuesday who have vowed to combat cyberattacks.
The companies pledged to “defend all customers everywhere from malicious attacks by cybercriminal enterprises and nation-states” as signees of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord.
“The companies will not help governments launch cyberattacks and will protect against tampering or exploitation of their products and services through every stage of technology development, design and distribution,” states the agreement.
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Beyond helping meddling governments, there are three other keys to the agreement: “stronger defense,” “collective action,” and “capacity building.” Tied together, the companies aim to better safeguard users from attacks.
The accord comes after a year of well-publicized hacks. The “WannaCry” virus hit hundreds of thousands of people last year, including the British National Health Service. Equifax’s 2017 data breach left more than 100 million Americans vulnerable to having their social security numbers compromised. And recently, Facebook’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica data leak, where up to 87 million users had their info grabbed by the political firm in 2014, along with Russian trolls leveraging the platform during the 2016 election, has increased scrutiny on the tech industry’s ability to protect its users.
“The devastating attacks from the past year demonstrate that cyber security is not just about what any single company can do but also about what we can all do together,” said Microsoft president Brad Smith in a statement. “This tech sector accord will help us take a principled path toward more effective steps to work together and defend customers around the world.”
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Here are all 34 companies, listed alphabetically, that signed the accord: ABB, Arm, Avast, Bitdefender, BT, CA Technologies, Cisco, Cloudflare, DataStax, Dell, DocuSign, Facebook, Fastly, FireEye, F-Secure, GitHub, Guardtime, HP Inc., HPE, Intuit, Juniper Networks, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Nielsen, Nokia, Oracle, RSA, SAP, Stripe, Symantec, Telefonica, Tenable, Trend Micro, and VMware.
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